The weather was so balmy this afternoon that I walked home from the Hospital for Special Surgery after the Remicade infusion. As always, I felt very lucky to walk along the river on my way somewhere. I wish that the Greenway were unbroken; I’d walk down to see Will. I think that I might just about manage that.

***

Last night, I watched three movies — in the days before infusions, I have learned to take it easy — and one of them was John Cromwell’s In Name Only (RKO, 1939). I don’t know why this picture, with Carole Lombard, Cary Grant, and Kay Francis, isn’t a better-known classic. It’s quick and sharp, and the stars make sure that it never gets drippy. Kay Francis plays a scheming adventuress who has married Cary Grant for his money, and then charmed the pants off his parents so that they take her side when their son, having taken the measure of his new wife a tad too late, cools toward her. Needless to say, she refuses to give him a divorce. One fine day, he meets Carole Lombard, and they two of them get along like a couple of screwballs. (How come they never made a screwball comedy together?) Now Cary really wants a divorce, and Kay gives in, or says she does. She goes off to Europe with Cary’s parents while Cary buys a house for Carole, complete with a nursery. When Kay returns, it appears that she never had any intention of following through with the divorce, so Cary gets drunk and falls asleep in front of an open window on Christmas Eve, catching pneumonia. In a fantastic finale, Kay reveals her true colors to Carole outside Cary’s room at the hospital, unaware that his parents have slipped in behind her. Cary is still pretty sick when the film fades to black, but a happy ending is promised.

Kay Francis is magnificently odious, and, in two scenes, when she’s being candid with a crony, she is positively corrupt. It’s an extraordinary performance, because she’s so beautiful, or at any rate so beautifully put together, that you’re always glad to see her, even when she’s being monstrous (which is always). Carole Lombard, in contrast, is almost scraggly, pinched, slightly gone to seed. Which is good for the movie: it makes you root for her. Cary Grant, who gets to do a delirium scene for real (not that he overplays it), looks younger than ever, but in his scenes alone with Kay he is all business — Mr Lucky, almost. Fans of Vertigo will be amused by the dispatch with which he shoos off the unwanted attentions of Kay’s best friend, Helen Vinson.

The film is set in Connecticut by day (mostly) and Manhattan by night. The production is done to a turn, and not a degree further; it’s as though art director Van Nest Polglase had just read the entire oeuvre of John P Marquand. The clothes are simply perfect; no film that I’ve seen makes a better case for 1939 as the Best Year in Twentieth Century fashion, at least so far as day wear is concerned. There is really no good reason for women to have deviated from the cut and shape on display in this movie. At one point, Cary takes Carole to the Harvard Game on the train, and she wears a short jacket not unlike one that Kathleen used to have, with big buttons. The only more captivating outfit in all of cinema is Grace Kelly’s Jacques Fath knockoff (the green suit) in Rear Window.

Could it be that nobody thinks highly of Carole Lombard anymore? Sure, everyone knows My Man Godfrey, but she’s something of a freak in that. Nothing Sacred and Made For Each Other aren’t as well known as they used to be (are they?), and To Be Or Not To Be got remade by Anne Bancroft. My favorite Lombard picture is Mr and Mrs Smith, but nobody likes that one, because it’s a screwball comedy by Alfred Hitchcock. Which makes it really the darkest of Hitchcock’s always funny movies. Lombard had a tendency to scream, and she also never shook that fruity early-Thirties studio dialect. (Francis is even worse, of course; plus, she lisps like Elmer Fudd.)

I discovered In Name Only about twenty years ago, leafing through Leonard Maltin, who called it “a solid soaper.” I was inclined to agree at the time, but now I must insist that it is brighter and more charming than that. As I say, its success owes as much to its speed as it does to its cast. While never rushing the action, Cromwell never lingers. The jolly note struck now and then by Roy Webb’s score is a bit off, but it doesn’t linger, either. Do us both a favor and get to know this movie.

***

In the current New York Review of Books, Giles Harvey reviews the Melrose novels, and, sure enough, he quotes the Emily Price sentence. I wonder what Edward St Aubyn makes of the inevitability of this extraordinarily felicitous phrase.

We are very quiet today. Kathleen is in bed; she had an attack of food poisoning, yesterday afternoon. At least that’s all we can think it might be. As in my case last week, she hasn’t run a fever. It seems very odd, these attacks, spaced too far apart to suggest contagion of any kind.

For my part, I’m all right, and my appointments for tomorrow’s Remicade infusion have been confirmed. I have no ambitions for the day beyong quietly passing through it. I’ve started reading George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. So far, I’ve learned about the origins of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton — which I was piqued to discover didn’t become “Princeton” until 1896. Before that, it was the College of New Jersey. It sort of makes me want to visit the island of Jersey, to try to get an idea of why anybody would name anything after it. Where’s New Guernsey?

***

After yesterday’s errands, I found myself unmotivated to do anything productive, so I sat down with Lisa Hilton’s The Horror of Love and finished it. The title is Nancy’s comment on a romantically disagreeable coincidence involving Marguerite de Gramont, one of Gaston Palewski’s many lady friends other than herself. Hilton writes,

Nancy caught Gaston dining with her in the most unfortunate of cirumstances. She had taken Peter [Rodd, her husband with whom she was no longer intimate] and his two nephews to a restaurant and there at a nearby table were Margot and Nancy’s colonel. She then invited her guests to see the Louvre by night, surely one of the loveliest sights in the world. As if they were all players in a hideous farce, there were Gaston and Margot, hand in hand. Later, she explained to Diana that what she couldn’t bear was that he had looked happy, “so dreadful to prefer the loved one to be unhappy…Oh, the horror of love.”

Hilton’s book is aptly titled and subtitled (Nancy Mitford and Gaston Palewski in Paris and London). It is not a love story. How can it be, when Gaston was never in love with Nancy? He adored her cleverness and intelligence, but these were after all traits that he might just as easily find in a male friend. It was rotten luck that Nancy had never before experienced the sexual pleasure to which Gaston introduced her, because she would otherwise have realized that there are lots of good fish in the sea. The Mediterranean Sea, not the North Sea. She had known clever and intelligent Englishmen by the dozens, but they were either gay, uninspired, or, like her husband, they preferred “to make love with ladies whose profession it was.” Gaston Palewski’s taste for charming amateurs came as a delightful surcaprise, one from which Nancy never recovered.

So she fell in love, to the extent that it’s not unintelligent to speak of unrequired passion as love. Nobody wants to read a book about that, and Hilton wisely assumes that readers will be familiar with her source material, which of course they will be, since it consists of three volumes that anybody interested in the matter will have already acquired, Love From Nancy, a selection of Nancy’s letters; the correspondence that Nancy had with Evelyn Waugh; and The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sixters (all edited by Charlotte Mosley). I think it’s safe to say that these letters are the reason for our interest in the Mitfords today; without them, we would just have a handful of interesting lives led by ladies of long-ago. Nancy’s letters bring the girls and their muddles to life. Perhaps because she never had children of her own, perhaps because she was “the lady writer,” or maybe simply because she was who she was, she encompassed her sisters in a sense of family that the others never quite shared. 

Instead of rehashing what we already know about Nancy, then, Hilton tells us what we didn’t know about the love of her life, Gaston Palewski, the son of a Polish Jew who was brought to Paris by an uncle when he was a child. Gaston grew up in relative prosperity and was well-educated, complete with a year at Brighton College and a term at Oxford (his English was fluent if heavily accented), not to mention the Sorbonne and Sciences Po’. His eventual career owed much to the good fortune of having a cousin in the military who, during World War I, had escaped from a German POW camp with none other than Charles De Gaulle. When De Gaulle made his heroic stand against the Vichy capitulation of Hitler, Gaston, by now a close friend, was among the first to recognize him at his own peril.

After World War II, De Gaulle would make Gaston the ambassador to Italy (a post which installed him in the Palazzo Farnesse, of Tosca fame), president of the Constitutional Council, and minister of scientific research. I see that there is a new book about Gaston, intriguingly subtitled “premier baron de Gaullisme.” Hilton’s account makes one wonder why Palewski’s career failed to secure him a clearer place in the firmament. It is suggested this his fluency in the language of amour caused him to be regarded as a lightweight by men less doués in this regard. Perhaps his handicap was nothing more complicated than the bachelorhood that he did not bring to an end until he was nearly seventy. Instead of Nancy, he married a Franco-American with a Polish title.

Curiously, Hilton’s assumption that we already know how ardenly Nancy longed for Gaston, that we’ve already wondered if Gaston’s wedding announcement caused Nancy to succumb to Hodgkins’ Disease, that, in short, we’re all on the same page about the horror of love — all of this frees her to write give us an assessment of Nancy’s career that is free of romantic contortions. Among other things, Hilton sets us straight about Nancy’s “denunciation” of her sister, Diana Mosley, in 1940. Diana was not interned in Holloway Prison on Nancy’s say-so alone; nor did Nancy one day up and take a taxi to Whitehall in order to stir up trouble. The inquiry into the possibility that Diana might be a dangerous traitor was launched (unsurprisingly) by her former father-in-law, Lord Moyne, and Nancy was called in as a character witness, to confirm what the Home Office already suspected. It must have been an awful spot to be in, and it’s hard, even now, to say that Nancy did the right thing. But the notion that she acted out of spite or jealousy (Diana’s having married not one but two handsome, rich men) is an idle one. Diana never did grasp that the Nazis were bad eggs, and there was no question about her welcoming an invasion. It was her own testimony that put her away. Hilton quotes the advisory committee’s judgment: “It would be quite impossible, having regard to her expressed attitude and her past activities with the leaders of Nazi Germany, to allow her to remain at liberty in these critical days.”

Hilton also indulges in some righteous America-bashing. (Don ‘t expect any strenuous objections from me.)

From her Parisian perspective on the transatlantic culture of the 1940s and 1950s, Nancy saw America as representative of precisely the opposite of this cherished list of values. She greatly enjoyed herself in the role of heretic. Sixty years after The Blessing‘s publication, it is more true than ever that “it is considered nowadays perfectly all right to throw any amount of aspersions at poor old France and England, but one tiny word reflecting anything but exaggerated love for new rich America is thought to be the worst of taste.” Unlike many of Nancy’s declared passions, including her devotion to France, which she exaggerated to tease friends like Evelyn, her loathing for America was entirely serious. In 1957 she told the Herald Tribune, “I hate everything that has to do with American civilization, your plastics, your skyscrapers, refrigerators, psychoanalysis and Coca-Cola.” One really is not allowed to say things like that anymore. [!] People whom Americans term”liberals” can get away with criticizing particular political policies, the injustice of big business, violence or racism perhaps, but to declare that one loathes everything about America is blasphemous. To be declaredly anti-American is to be instantly dismissed, as Nancy was by Rhoda Koenig in The Sunday Times: “Mitford’s anti-Americanism was merely the more obvious expression of her unpleasant personality.” Only nasty people, after all, dislike America.

Zut! I only wish that Hilton had worked into this passage Nancy’s earnest objection to “youth culture,” which, if not the root of the American problem, is certainly its most toxic outgrowth.

As I mentioned the other day, I’ve been reading the British edition of The Horror of Love, which is, so far, the only one. I’ll be curious to see if it comes out here.

 

According to Stephen Holden’s review in the Times, Lasse Hallström’s lovely new movie, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is based on an “absurdist” novel by Paul Torday, a late bloomer who has written a clutch of novels in the past couple of years. I was shocked to read this, because even though the adaptation does begin with a lot of giggling and spluttering about the absurdity of setting up a salmon-fishing operation anywhere in the Arabian Peninsula, it swiftly moves into deeply romantic territory, with a Disney-spectacular buildup to the exulting sight of a large fish jumping high out of the water. By this point, nobody has been laughing for some time. By the end of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, I’d completely forgotten how funny it was at the start.

Mr Holden writes,

Whether Harriet and Fred will get together is a question that hovers over the movie. The appeal of the film depends on the charm of Mr. McGregor and Ms. Blunt, whose polite but discreetly charged connection is the story’s emotional center.

Well, yeah. Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt engage in some very old-fashioned movie magic here. This is not one of those stories about Brits who are too buttoned-up to make easy connections. For one thing, Mr McGregor plays a Scotsman, Alfred Jones (it’s nice to hear him speak his native tongue), who is not at all shy. For the other, Ms Blunt’s character, Harriet Chetwold-Talbot, is attached to a military officer who goes missing in Afghanistan, and Ms Blunt makes you feel what she’s going through as she worries about him. The salmon project, conceived by a wealthy sheik, brings Alfred and Harriet together, and it’s immediately clear that they are both very kind and decent people. What’s more, this kindness and decency are invigorating for both of them — certainly for Alfred, who is inspired to reconsider his stale marriage to a banker who has slipped into a habit of belittling him. How do we get from kindness and decency to romance? That’s where the magic comes in. The actors know that no one is going to question their characters’ falling in love if they show them falling in love, and Ms Blunt and Mr McGregor are more than equal to the challenge. As Mr Holden notes, you’re not sure until the last minute that the colleagues will become a couple, owing to prior commitments, but a fondness of Shakespearean charm is so well established by the middle of the movie that it almost doesn’t matter how they end up.

Did I say something about no laughing? Kristin Scott Thomas, as the Prime Minister’s press secretary, unfurls her best dragon suit and incinerates the fools who make her suffer. Is there a more cynical walk of life than that of the press secretary? We begin by laughing, but soon we simply beam: it’s impossible to settle on whether the shameless press secretary is funnier than Ms Scott Thomas playing the shameless press secretary. You’re glad that she’s not the Prime Minister, though; she’d undoubtedly be provoked to launch a few nukes by sheer unmanageable exasperation with human feebleness.

I want to note that the actor who plays the sheik, Amr Waked, does a magnificent job with what might have been an insufferable role, bringing fresh moves to a stock character.  

***

The weather has warmed up, so I ran Wednesday’s errands, such as they were, today; on Wednesday itself, I’ll be at the hospital, for the entire afternoon, doing the Remicade rag. In addition to the errands, I thought that I’d go to the Shake Shack, so I packed an old cloth napkin and headed up the street. The line was longish and not moving, so I ran the errands and came back; the line was just as long but it was moving. I pulled out a recent, not the latest, New York Review of Books, and read Elaine Blair on Michel Houellebecq.

Before Les particules élémentaires even came out in English, I had a copy of the original, one of the first books that I bought from abroad on the Internet. I read perhaps forty or fifty pages before putting it down. Not only was it unpleasant, it was boring. Horribly, horribly boring. Thereafter, I kept up with the reviews of Houellebecq’s new books, but was never tempted to buy one. Everything about the man and his work seemed disagreeable, without being interesting. Eventually, I stopped reading the reviews as well. I was drawn to Elaine Blair’s review of The Map and the Territory because the NYRB cover headline announced that “Houellebecq Goes Off Sex.” What, then?

I read the piece at the Shake Shack, and it was in the middle of a sumptuous double Shackburger that I had the added satisfaction of reading this:

Houellebecq likes to scorn the idea of individual personality, which to him is all a matter of minor differences. … In writing about love, it would be precious and boring, from Houellebecq’s point of view, to go on about her unique qualities and his unique qualities and the subtle ways in which all of their qualities draw them together and pull them apart. There is an element of expediency in this position, for Houellebecq has no apparent ability to conceive of different personalities with unique qualities. He is a novelist with only one character in him.

So it wasn’t the sex that turned me off, or not just the sex. It was the sheer tedium of following a solitary character pace in the cage of his unimaginative consciousness.

There’s something almost as good later on; by this time, sadly, there was nothing left but my chocolate shake. “The [new] novel affects the reader like a glamorous advertisement for work; it mightmake one want to work, but obscurely, and not at the real-life tasks that one is supposed to be doing.” Actually, that’s better, because it’s not really about Houellebecq; it’s about the alternative world of advertising, in which the idea of effort is annihilated by great design, and we see ourselves in states of being that do not involve actual doing. It’s like the vision that Levenger catalogues invariably produce: You see yourself in a café, writing a novel by hand. As you fill the pages of a cunning notebook, ink flows from your exceptional pen with the consistency of mayonnaise.

When, at the end of Amber Dermont’s debut novel, The Starboard Sea, we learn what it was, the terrible thing that the narrator, Jason, did to his best friend Cal, the thing that, unbeknownst to everyone else in the boys’ world of privilege, led Cal to hang himself from a pipe in their prep school dorm room, we wonder if it was so terrible, and we think that perhaps Cal overreacted. But not right away. Our immediate response is to feel swamped by Jason’s guilt and Cal’s despair: it was an awful thing to do, largely because it was meant to be awful. And when the excitement of the discovery subsides, and we get used to knowing what we have waited hundred of pages to find out, we recall that teenagers are never more volatile, reckless, or cruel (just as they are never more ecstatic) than when they feel that they’re in love. For many people, most of them far from the unluckiest, love is the most painful of life’s lessons. Almost everyone pulls through somehow. Dermont has given us, in her novel, the shadow of a boy who didn’t, and her achievement is wonderfully grave.  

The achievement is unfortunately qualified by a strategic miscalculation that Dermont is hardly the first to make. If I had an intern, I’d ask for a list of the instances in which I’ve complained that a book would have been much better had it been told in the third person, and not in the first. There are only two occasions for employing the first person in fiction: when the narrator is almost an exclusively an observer, someone who brushes up against the action only just enough to put the reader into the picture, and who never does anything to distract the reader from the principal characters; and when the narrator’s very voice — meaning his or her personality, his or her view of the case — is the story. (What makes Rebecca, which ought to have been just another disposable gothic potboiler, so thrilling is that it rises to both of these occasions not only supremely well but simultaneously.) The Starboard Sea meets neither of these conditions. Jason Prosper is a high-school senior, eighteen going on nineteen. Despite the world of privilege in which he has grown up, he remains a normally, inescapably callow teenager. As a result, he talks about his world — and he talks about it at great length — with a combination of fatuousness and condescension that makes the first half of the novel, before the story really gets going, a slog to read.

Some of the prose lapses might very well have been committed in the third person as well. Dermont’s diction is not the finest; her syntax can be shaky (I found two instances of dangling modifier), but, worse, she is drawn to the bad fine writing that makes nouns out of verbs. “He was trying to make a point about World War I and the Lost Generation,” Jason recounts, sketching a teacher’s frustration, “and he was stunned when almost no one understood what he was referencing.” Wouldn’t an artless teenager have said that no one knew what he was talking about? (What makes Americans say these things? It can’t be that we have all read too many fucking manuals.) There is a touch of Harlequin exceptionalism —

Many of the girls I considered to be pretty had soft, rounded features. Small eyes, creamy skin. This girl was different. Her features called attention to the high planes of her cheeks and forehead, the sharp angles of her lips and eyes. Unlike Bristin’s or Diana’s faces, which begged and invited “Admire me,” her face had a quiet authority. A frontier quality that said, “I am not to be put on display. I am not here to be looked at.” She stood tall. Had I not seen her crawling through a window, I might have mistaken her for a teacher. Even then, I was certain of her beauty, but I was also certain that a person could miss this about her.

— that is not only wildly exotic in this rich kids’ setting, but strangely belabored, coming from a boy. We might interpret the last sentence as a sign that Jason feels manfully protective of the mysterious girl, but whether or not this point is worth arguing, it turns out that Jason’s sexual satisfactions have been largely homosexual. Make no mistake: The Starboard Sea is no coming-out novel. Jason clearly subscribes to Gore Vidal’s theory that there are no homosexuals, only homosexual acts. The boy he still loves, Cal, the dead boy, comes round to this view, too, but too late, too late to forestall a brutally cruel homosexual act.

And a third-person narrator might have been just as annoying about Jason’s world. The book abounds in throwaway mentions of Dorrian’s and “gin-and-tonic lockjaw” that are little more than exclusive secret handshakes all but intended to intensify the smugness of knowing readers. (A joke on me: when I asked Kathleen if she knew what Head of the Charles meant, she shook her head, but, before I could snort at Dermont’s obscurantism, Kathleen said, “I didn’t know any rowers.”) But there might have been more description and less name-tossing had an older and presumably wiser head been doing the talking. Intelligent children of privilege, at least the ones who aren’t sociopathic, don’t know what to make of their benefits, which may have always been there for them, but which are so palpably not there for most people. They’re insecure about wealth in a way that’s different from the parvenu’s: kids don’t know what it means, for example, to have a full-length portrait of one’s great-grandmother, painted by Sargent no less, in one’s dining room. (Parvenues are all to sure that they do.) Whatever it means, it’s beyond the compass of adolescent understanding. (I’m talking about the teenagers who are bright enough to know that having a Sargent hanging on the walls of one’s home is extraordinary — very much Dermont’s territory.

The tendency to confuse apples and oranges because they’re both colorful ends up undercutting, and almost trivializing, what ought to have been the most riveting angle of the story, which is not why Cal hanged himself. Running in parallel to Jason’s story about Cal, which he dribbles out in suitably suspenseful doses, there is what turns out to be a case of manslaughter, pieced together by Jason in his capacity as amateur detective. Jason believes, understandably but groundlessly, that the death would never have occurred if he had only… been there for her. He concludes that he has let not one but two lovers down. He lets himself off the hook, I’m happy to say, with a vision of his two BFFs watching over him benevolently from their fixture among the stars. But he never grasps the adult differentiation between the bad thing that he did within an attachment of love, and the bad thing that his classmates did in the course of a hazing prank.  

I can’t think why Dermont didn’t see that this was bound to happen, especially if she undertook to make Jason’s voice plausibly adolescent. A friend suggested that there are a lot of writers who see themselves as Peter Pans, capable of entering into and recreating boyish states of mind, but I don’t charge Dermont with delusions of grandeur. I think she felt that her story would be more engrossing if it were told by a brokenhearted lover. I concede that it would have been more work to engage the reader from the perspective of an omniscient observer, but that’s what distinguishes the stories that you never forget — and Dermont does tell one of those — from the novels that you want to read again.

***

 

At 4:30 yesterday morning, I was awakened by severe gastric distress. The crisis came and went quickly, but I was left queasily inert for most of the following day. It seemed pretty clearly to be a case of food poisoning, which was disturbing because I’d made the cheeseburger myself, just the way I always make them. Perhaps the meat was undercooked; I can’t think of another explanation. I’m afraid that I’d somewhat arrogantly thought that food bought at our local markets must be safe as a matter of course, because this is, after all, the Upper East Side.

Although distressed by the loss of a day’s work, I made the most of the idea that I’m not supposed to feel well anyway right now. I’ve got a Remicade infusion scheduled for next week, but it has been thirteen weeks since the last one, not too far shy of twice as long as the recommended dosage, which is eight weeks. I did a fair amount of reading, considering, and I watched a couple of bleakish videos. Kathleen came home early and we ordered in Chinese — wonton soup for me, which was all the appealed. I read Dexter Filkins’s piece about Recip Tayyap ErdoÄŸan and Turkey’s power blocs in The New Yorker, and was gratified that my picture of the Turkish prime minister was enhanced but not altered by the report. Yet more arrogance. At eleven or so, without having had so much as a glass of wine, I took my pills and stretched out.

***

The movies that I watched yesterday were on my list of things to see, but on Tuesday night, while I did the ironing, I saw something that Fossil Darling had caught over the weekend on TCM, Tony Richardson’s The Entertainer, one of Laurence Olivier’s most interesting performances. It’s interesting partly because Olivier subdues his natural exuberance until his performance blends in with the ensemble cast. He does this, I think, not out of some professional scrupulousness but because he understands that toning himself down is the best way to convey how bitter and mean the character of Archie Rice is. Archie is a music-hall veteran who has never achieved his father’s fame, probably because he doesn’t like people much and only wants to see his name in lights; in a field that demanded unstinting generosity from its stars, Archie is doomed to mediocrity, no matter how well he sings or dances. It is also interesting to see Olivier in a play by John Osborne. Only Olivier in Pinter could be more bizarre.

I’m minded to say that the entertainer of the title isn’t Archie but his father, Billy, played by Roger Livesey, a fixture who would later play the Duke of St Bungay in The Pallisers. Billy is persuaded to come out of retirement to save Archie’s catastrophic fortunes. The producers are ecstatic: this is the man they’ve been wanting to put on the stage, not Archie. Archie’s vanity is hardly wounded; he just wants the box office. He’s neither smart nor curious enough to grasp that British culture has undergone a sea change: the bits of raucous rock ‘n’ roll that make Archie’s eyes roll herald the Beatles, so soon to prevail upon the scene. And although I can’t identify anything particularly imperalistic about the music hall tradition, there is a felt connection between the fading of the latter and the end of the Empire, signaled here by the Suez crisis that claims the life of one of Archie’s sons, played by the young and rocksome Albert Finney.

Another star in The Entertainer is Brenda de Banzie, whom you may recall from the second of Hitchcock’s versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much. At first presented as a stylish matron, de Banzie’s character is shown to be a drab criminal fraught with misgivings; there is a touch of Deborah Kerr about her passion for doing the right thing in the end. In The Entertainer, she plays Phoebe, Archie’s lost, somewhat boozy second wife. In the middle of the movie, Pheobe has a sort of breakdown, and erupts in a tirade that combines “gentleman callers” with “could have been a contender.” It was a revelatory, but at the same time hilarious moment. I had never occurred to me that John Osborne’s explosive transformation of English theatre was powered at least in part by his study of American developments.

I never knew about Joan Plowright until she was an old lady, more or less, and I always wondered what Olivier, whose widow she was, saw in her. Now that I’ve seen The Entertainer, it doesn’t seem so daft. Plowright isn’t beautiful by any means but she is almost pretty in a pert way, and when she was young and thin and her voice about an octave higher, her intelligence must have seemed extraordinary.

Alan Bates is in The Entertainer, too. You’d almost never know it.

***

Thanks to Imodium, I was able to complete my circuit of Wednesday-afternoon errands without distress. I walked into the barbershop at precisely the right moment: Willy was free. While I sat in the chair being trimmed, three men walked in, the last one in for a longish wait. I stopped in at the Video Room to return The Entertainer, and there I picked up two used DVDs, Margin Call, which I saw and liked, and Love Crime, which I didn’t see and am afraid of hating. But it stars Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludovine Sagnier. I hope that it’s as gripping as Swimming Pool, which Ms Sagnier made with the other féroce anglaise, Charlotte Rampling. (I adore Jane Birkin, but she is not féroce.)

At Crawford Doyle, I stopped to look in the window first, and what did I see but The Horror of Love: Nancy Mitford and Gaston Palewski in Paris and London, by Lisa Hilton. I could tell, somehow, that this was another of those British imports that the shop carries, especially when a Mitford is involved — and it wasn’t just that I hadn’t heard of the book that tipped me off. There was something about the typography. I wondered how much it would cost. The shop doesn’t overcharge for these titles; I know what they’d cost me if I ordered them from Amazuke. A steal, I thought, at $44. And what do I read on the first page? Suffice it to say that Gaston Palewski was not, not, not, as I had always assumed, and doubtless by the Mitford Industry encouraged to assume, the scion of an aristocratic Polish family domiciled in Paris since, say, the days of Queen Marie LeszczyÅ„ska. No.

Then to Greenberg’s for cookies and cake, and a stop at the bank. All the while, I was reading, whenever forced to stand still, Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel. I’m sorry, but how is it that this book is not in the canon? It is certainly the funniest book about novel-writing and publishing that I have ever read, or that I expect to read. The title character is a lower-middle teenager with no experience of life who resolves to escape her tawdry surroundings by writing best-sellers, and, guess what, she succeeds at the first go. This is not to say that her publisher can’t find anything in her manuscript to improve.

He sat down at his desk again, aware that his questions were arousing her suspicion, and shuffled in a business-like way through a folder of papers. “Miss Deverell,” he began, “we should like to publish your book, as I have said, and I hope we shall make a success of it. In a capricious world, no one can be sure. Obviously, there are some suggestions to put forward and some alterations we hope you will make.” He smiled, but felt authority ebbing from him [Angel Deverell has this effect on everybody.] “That is usual,” he said. “For instance, we cannot have a character called the Duchess of Devonshire as there is one …[sic] in everyday life; if a duchess’s life could ever be so described. But that can soon be changed. We can easily find a way out of that. Perhaps you have erred on the lavish side. I don’t know much about grandeur, and great establishments, but I thought we cut down and manage with one butler, eh?” His jocularity was coldly received. “May I give you some more tea?”

“…if a duchess’s life could ever be so described.” The amiable publisher is thinking that no real Duchess of Devonshire could colorably bring a case of libel, so completely implausible is Angel’s colorful account. Ha! The D of D of the day, now the dowager, Nancy Mitford’s youngest sister, brought a libel case against one of the London papers, at about the same age as Angel Deverell, when her name was mixed up with that of another sister, Jessica. She was awarded thousand pounds and bought a nice fur coat.

If the comic potential of the Central Intelligence Agency has only recently been tapped, and then mostly for wry satires, such as Burn After Reading, that present the agency as a plodding bureaucracy, the agency has long furnished Hollywood with a narrative matrix for action movies; one might argue that that is its only remaining effective function. That may have provided all the reassurance that the greenlighters needed when asked to approve This Means War, a romantic comedy involving blood-brother agents who like to kick, punch, and shoot at least as much as they care to fondle. Falling into a rivalry for the love of one woman, they turn the full range of their professional resources against one another in the pursuit of love.  

Being gentlemen, at least nominally, the agents decline to kick, punch and shoot at one another until the very end, when they finally indulge in one of their scene-clearing brawls. We know about these fights because the movie opens with one, and a subsidiary revenge plot that targets the agents keeps violence on the boil throughout the proceedings. I would like to say that Tom Hardy is a lot more convincing than Chris Pine at using his head rather than his fists in the pursuit of love, but I think I’m biased; I really like Tom Hardy. But I’m not sure that he has any more business in a comedy than Mr Pine does. With his eyes welling up with bruised affection, Mr Hardy is another kind of hero, and This Means War gives him the opportunity to play his long suit, in a subplot involving his son and ex-wife. Aha! Son and ex-wife! It’s a credit to the filmmakers, headed by a director called, simply, McG (boys! he’s Joseph McGinty Nichol, from Kalamazoo), that the one agent’s prior meaningful relationships do not forewarn us that the other’s lack of them has marked him for victory with Lauren, the lady in question, played gamely by Reese Witherspoon. That may be because the romantic aspect of the film is taken up largely by Lauren’s inability to decide between two so evenly-matched specimens of manly hunkitude. Her confidant is a married woman played by an actress who seems to be running an independent comic shtick, in the venerable tradition of Eve Arden. This friend has a foul mouth and spouts bad advice. She is the last person in the world that Lauren would plausibly listen to, but this departure from likelihood matches the handling of the CIA, whose acronym in this movie might as well stand for “Cartoon Intelligence Agency.”

Aside from the fisticuffs, which are so fast and furious that my eyes couldn’t follow the action, This Means War is so neatly made that, language aside, it could have starred Doris Day and Rock Hudson. Sneer not: Angela Bassett and Rosemary Harris have pungent if lean supporting roles. There are some very funny moments, especially when each of the lovers has to sit through a critique of his charms that has been surreptitiously recorded by the other. This amusing twist on the focus group is all the more piquant because Lauren is an analyst of consumer products who knows her onions as well as her suitors know theirs. At the climax, when the bad guy is about to mow down the romantic trio with a bulletproofed SUV, Lauren calls out to the boys to shoot out the headlights, because on all late models of this particular vehicle, a broken headlight triggers the airbags. This information not only saves our friends but puts an end to the villain’s life of crime. When the smoke clears, Lauren proclaims her choice with an embrace, and Tuck (Mr Hardy), revealed by TV news coverage of the climactic mayhem to be something other than a travel agent, is reunited with his ex-wife and son.

So that’s Chelsea Handler!

***

Halfway through The Starboard Sea, the story picks up momentum and the writing becomes less displeasing, but I’ve found at least two misplaced modifiers, and one of them is delicious. It contains it own little time machine. Because the sentence can be construed as grammatically correct when it’s read out of context, I’ll have to set the scene.

     The girls had a two-bedroom suite with a view of the Public Gardens. Though the hotel wouldn’t serve us alcohol in the restaurant, they were happy to send liquor up to the room. First we raided the minibar. Then we ordered a stash of top-shelf liquor.
      Within minutes of being in the suite, teams of crew jocks began flooding the room.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers to hear that I have never experienced what used to be called “writer’s block.” I say “used to” because it occurs to me that you never hear the phrase anymore. Perhaps it has taken the place of homosexuality as the secret that dare not breathe its name, a shocking personal defect that must never be confessed. However oppressive to sufferers of writer’s block, such a silence would atone for the attention that whining impotent writers used to claim. What’s really surprising is how sorry everyone else felt for blocked writers. Wasn’t there anything that could be done? Yes, it turned out that there was. In fact, there are at least two cures.  

The simpler cure is to acknowledge that you are not a writer, or at least not a writer capable of compassing the thoughts that beguile you. If you are not a writer, then you must find something else to do. If you’re reaching beyond your grasp, then you must find something else within it, and get to work on that. 

It is simpler still to acknowledge that you are a lazy, vain bum. Laziness and vanity, the gentle vices, are opposite sides of the same coin, and both reflect the absence of an active interest in life. The bum who complains of writer’s block expects his book to come to him in the form of “inspiration.” This strange idea is not entirely the bum’s fault. Ancient writers used to justify their work by claiming divine inspiration. God or a muse directed the course of every sentence, the writer doing little more than taking dictation. It’s easy to see why this theory of artistry would appeal to lazy, vain bums.

There are cases that look like writer’s block but aren’t. There’s Wagneritis, for example. This is what you’ve got when you keep realizing that you must go back to the real beginning of your story. If you are Wagner, you know when to stop. Wagner did not go back to the real beginning of his Ring story. He began at from which there were still plenty of backstories to be narrated. He was shrewd enough to distinguish the beginning of his story from the beginning of his drama. Wagner did write gorgeous music, but I do think sometimes that what made him a genius for the ages was his triumph over crippling megalomania. You can’t say that Wagner didn’t get things done.

Then there are the centipedes who have been paralysed by thinking about what they’re doing. Philosophy is not a healthy undertaking generally, but it is particularly injurious to creative writers. Some victims never recover; others, more’s the pity, stuff their philosophizing into their work, where the rest of us have to slog through it.

No, my problem was never writer’s block.

***

As noted over the weekend, I listened to Siegfried on Saturday. I haven’t listened to Wagner much in the past couple of years. Every now and then, Tristan or Die Meistersinger, rarely getting all the way through either, not because of flagging interest but because I had to go do something else before the music was over. I had the feeling that listening to Wagner was an indulgence, perhaps even a guilty pleasure. Beneath the glittering, sumptuous surface, after all, what you’ve got is unwholesome chunks of Schopenhauer. Considering his philosophy, you might think that Schopenhauer ought to have been a blocked writer: why, with such a world view, carry on at all? But carry on is what Schopenhauer miserably did. And as a result of his influence on Wagner, if we’re all going to hell in a handbasket, then what a gloriously upholstered handbasket it is!

Inclined more to duty than to volupté, I’d been listening a lot to Verdi. Verdi never had anything to do with mythology; every one of his operas has all of its feet planted firmly in the real world of human weakness. Verdi’s music contrives to make you feel things, not to imagine them. He rouses your sympathy for virtue and your thirst for justice. He doesn’t make you think about them. That’s, curiously, what Wagner’s swirling sonic orgies do: they make you think. Or at least to brood. Aside from the hero, the goddess who wakes up at the end, and the little forest bird who gives great directions, the figures in Siegfried are brooders, and their brooding is contagious.

Siegfried does as he pleases, but recklessness, while exhilarating, is never wise. The music, especially when no one is singing, is as free as the bird. These are the obviously lively aspects of the opera. But let’s consider the dragon, which is meant to be scary. Let’s register the spell of intense anxiety that opens the second act. Wagner presents these darker elements so richly that you sit back and become aware that you are having a good time. When the Wanderer (Wotan) and Mime play their game of questions, the stakes are cosmic, but cosmic with a mythologizing glimmer that releases you from the need to pay strict attention. If you ask me, Wagner actually encourages one’s mind to wander, and it’s when your mind wanders that the music grips while allowing you to continue wandering, and you slip into Wagner Time, and all of a sudden the whole thing is over.

***

I’ve just spent a half hour checking out reviews of Peter Cameron’s Coral Glynn. I read the novel in two big swallows, staying up late one night to finish it. It was a delight to read, especially after Rose Macaulay’s nonpareil The Towers of Trebizond. But I’m reluctant to write about it, because there are too many little cracks in it that suggest trapdoors to other books — references, in other words, that I’m unable to identify. I’m especially puzzled by the children in the wood whose deadly game is just about the novel’s only moving part. Who are they? And why does the author think that he can just drop the murder of one of them? Is it a joke? Is it surreptitious clue, like a symbol in Umberto Eco? And how seriously are we supposed to take the title character’s dishonesty?

Coral Glynn’s readiness to temporize, prevaricate, and withhold might in a society such as ours today be taken as pathological, but Britain in 1950 was very unlike ours today, and a girl like Coral, without family or fortune, must make the most of every opportunity, even if that means wrapping up an employer’s sapphire ring and holding it until, ahem, somebody asks for it. The simple fact is that Cameron has dropped us into a world in which our moral compasses don’t work. We may be in the milieu described by his favorite novelists — Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor, and Macaulay — but the permissions are altogether different. What Pym and Macaulay could only hint at, in such a way that sophisticate readers alone knew what they were talking about, Cameron is free to discuss as openly as he likes, and if continues to rely on suggestion and innuendo, it’s for the fun of it, not the necessity.

A writer who goes unmentioned in the reviews that I’ve seen, as well as on Cameron’s Web site, is Ivy Compton-Burnett. Perhaps it’s been a while since I’ve read Compton-Burnett, but I was reminded of her on every page of Coral Glynn that was set at Hart House. (John Donne lived at Hart Hall at Oxford — does that mean anything?) A charmless pile in the middle of nowhere, Leicestershire. “There were no other houses within sight, for the meadows often flooded, and the air was damp and considered bad.” One is grateful that books don’t cast off odors. The laconic housekeeper, Mrs Prence, is right out of Compton-Burnett, too. (Or have I encountered her before in Henry James? Come to think of it, are those children revenants from “The Turn of the Screw”?) There’s a dour quality to the characters that embodies the unmentioned bleakness of Britain’s postwar rationing, still in effect in 1950, and behind it is everything heavy and uninvitingly overupholstered that one associates with the Victorians. Coral Glynn is the opposite of nostalgic.

The plot of  Coral Glynn is simple to the point of absent-mindedness. Everything hangs on death. First, Mrs Hart dies. She’s the beastly old lady, afflicted with cancer, whom Coral Glynn, a visiting nurse, has been retained to care for. No sooner is she dead than her son, a middle-aged gent with a limp, asks Coral to marry him. She asks leave to think over his offer, and goes out for a walk. On the walk, she encounters a boy and a girl playing a nasty game. She tells them to stop, but does nothing else about it, and mentions what she has seen to no one. But it’s possible that she has been disturbed by what she has seen into accepting Major Hart’s offer. Why does Coral press for an early wedding? Is she afraid of interference by that former employer, whose ring she still possesses (but at a terrible cost)? Asked by a detective if she saw the children playing in the woods, Coral takes a new friend’s advice and denies it. This is, of course, a mistake. But the upshot is all very unexpected, very untrue to any known genre of fiction, even the absurd. The other shoe does not drop; rather, it evaporates. Meanwhile, Coral has a whole new life in London, and is last seen darting up to Yorkshire in what one imagines to be a sporty car, deeply in love with her second husband. It’s the friend who gave the advice who marries the Major.

Where does Coral get the nerve to insist upon inviting to her wedding luncheon not only the owner of a dress shop (with whom she has had words) but also the “pansy” from the florist’s who reminds her of her brother (killed in North Africa)? At first, the Major is willing to concede an invitation to the lady, even though she’s in trade, but he balks at the boy from the flower shop. Coral persists; it’s quite strange. Is she daft? It’s as though Fanny Price, first thing after marrying Edmund, refused to leave her chilly old quarters at Mansfield: some things just aren’t done. On a different level of composition, but just as strange, there are the occasional violations of the pitch-perfect prose, which would otherwise, at least to my New Yorker’s ears, pass for the real Brit. The only clinker that comes to mind without a search is “site-specific,” a turn of phrase that I can’t imagine anyone using in a non-military context in the middle of the last century.

“This isn’t a church wedding, Mrs Coppard,” said Coral, who worried that Dolly’s mother’s sentimentality might be site-specific.

The really odd thing about that “worry” is its suggestion that Coral wants Mrs Coppard to cry at her wedding — a desire that it’s difficult to attribute to her. Coral may be mysterious, but we know a few things about her, and one of them is a decided resserve. I don’t mean to suggest that Peter Cameron has written a high parody of Ivy Compton-Burnett, or of any other author, or even of any kind of novel. But he plays with the paints in the palettes of long-dead writers; he doesn’t copy them. “Site-specific” is clearly playful; there’s no way that a writer as painstaking (and fun-having) as Cameron could have committed a solecism of that kind.

In short, the book is, in the most amusing way imaginable, very queer. Even aside from the banked embers of Robin Lofting’s love for the Major, a boyhood passion that Clement Hart may or may not have requited, whatever the two of them did with their clothes off, long ago. It did not strike me that the Clement whom we meet in the novel was suppressing an ardor for physical contact with Robin, or any other homosexual urge; indeed, he seemed eager to marry Coral, on whatever restricted sexual terms, simply for the sake of her pretty company. So Coral Glynn is surely not a novel about a love that couldn’t be written about in 1950. It’s play once again. This sunny display of carefree virtuosity, juxtaposed against the dank gloom of a house too nondescript to describe, is the real mystery of Coral Glynn: how does Peter Cameron bring it off? One doesn’t want to enter the world that he has recreated, but one doesn’t want to stop reading about it, either.

These remarks of mine are, I suspect, more annoying than anything else. I’ve certaintly not set out to write a review. The minute I finished Coral Glynn, I was sure I had been floated across some very thin ice that would undoubtedly crack open if I attempted to report the experience. And how to register my enthusiasm? I’m happy to say that I enjoyed reading Coral Glynn, but it ought to be equally clear that I’m not eager to recommend it to anyone else. I know too many people who hate not being in on a joke. If there is a joke — and that, of course, is the joke of jokes. Peter Cameron is no stranger to experimental fiction, but he has also written Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, an amiable book so accessible that it was marketed, over his objections, as “Young Adult,” which is why so many readers came to it from their adolescent children. He is, in short, a past master. If he’s up to something, he doesn’t have to say. Having only just read the book once, I’m not going to hazzard any guesses.

 

There’s a lot to report, but my head is still very cloudy. I sat up very late last night to finish Peter Cameron’s Coral Glynn, a novel that went down like the silkiest of desserts but then left the most perplexing aftertaste, which I shall eventually sort out, I suppose, but not this morning, when it is all I can do to remember that I myself am not a character in Coral Glynn.

Earlier in the evening, we saw Cynthia Nixon in Margaret Edson’s Wit. Kathleen completely crumpled for a few moments afterward, out in the street, overcome by the sadness and grief, still abiding, of a very close friend’s death a few years ago. I felt doubly terrible about her pain, because I hadn’t thought about the close friend at all. I’d thought of my mother, who died of chemotherapy over thirty years ago; of my aunt, who almost certainly saw Wit at some point in her theatregoing life and who very well may have been persuaded by it to avoid aggressive medical interventions when she failed to recovery properly from appendicitis last December — my aunt, as I knew her, was someone who would do anything to avoid being reduced to yelling, “It hurts like hell!” in an empty hospital room, and who would certainly prefer to die quietly in hospice, as she did; and I thought of myself, because I am much more familiar with some of the machinery that rolled about onstage than I was when I saw Wit the first time, long before Remicade came into my life. I didn’t think of Kathleen’s very close friend, and I was deeply ashamed for a minute or two. Then Kathleen spotted a taxi and we went to dinner.

***

And I thought about John Donne, whom I haven’t read in years, but whom I’d studied closely enough in school to know why he came to be considered a metaphysical poet. It’s ironic, really: at the very moment when the Aristotelian world-view, with its essences and epicycles and magnificent Judeo-Christian appliqués, was beginning its Inception-like crumbling into the sea of discarded ideas, just when Galileo and Newton were about to recreate the universe with very different laws, the English poets (Shakespeare certainly among them) created a gorgeous liturgy of love and divinity, set in rigorously “scientific” terms.

If they be two, they are two so
  As stiff twin compasses are two;
My soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
  To move but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
  Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
  And grows erect, as it comes home.

The reflorescence of Donne’s popularity among smart people coincided with the push to turn the humanities into sciences, with rules as geometrically invariable as anything in Euclid. Vivian Bearing, the poetry professor who is dying of ovarian cancer in Wit, embodies this dream in her stern teaching. Her course is so demanding that students take it simply to burnish their resumes, and what supreme irony it is when one of her former students, motivated by ambition, not love of learning, to do well in her course, reappears in her life as an apprentice chemotherapist, a student in training to learn how to see right through her animal wretchedness to the treatment’s toxic effectiveness.

How ironic — Edson is to be commended for muffling what might have been an insistent and therefore dulling chord in the composition of her play — for a scholar of metaphysical poetry to be treated by her doctors as a “specimen jar,” as she puts it, containing deadly tumors. Isn’t that way of becoming metaphysical oneself? A sympathetic nurse alerts the audience to the horror of the professionals’ callous disregard, but, as one of them herself, Vivian Bearing understands that the doctors are doing what they must (however roughly). Whether the moments of kindness that grace her ending amount to more than palliative care for the audience, I couldn’t say.

***

Do I have the right word here: how ironic it was to read Peter Cameron right on top of Edward St Aubyn? I will say this: between those two authors, Wit, and a gargantuan backup project that kept this computer busy throughout the night and now has me somewhat on tenterhooks, I feel rather like Patrick Melrose in his room at the Pierre, in Bad News, wondering what to next in order to counteract what he has already taken in the mad course of his self-inflicted chemotherapy.  

How can I more quickly persuade you not to read Edward St Aubyn’s A Clue to the Exit than by touting it as a novel “about consciousness”? That’s pretty much what the Sunday Times (London) does in a blurb printed on the back: “Striking metaphors and resonant evocations of sea and desert… accomplished reflections on the possibility of selfhood and the insolubility of consciousness.” It would not take much effort, I expect, for St Aubyn to tweak those lines into a grimly fatuous but also terribly funny parody of his own style. (I am going to resist the temptation to give it a try.) What grand and airy nonsense! It’s nonsense in that it presents A Clue to the Exit as if it belonged to the tradition of English travelogues in which, knowing nothing about them, really, I place Richard Burton, Robert Byron, and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Or perhaps a successor to Under the Sheltering Sky. Only instead of the Oxus or Ararat, we’re taken on a tour of the writer’s primitive and chaotic state of mind.

But St Aubyn, a born parodist, doesn’t stop there. He no mere entertainer — another thing that I probably oughtn’t to tell you if I want to you read the book — no mere fetcher-up of exotic locales and understated insights. He’s more like a really good workout coach, teaching you how to use muscles that you didn’t know you had while making you laugh quite a bit more than you expected to do. You don’t laugh all the time, but when you’ve negotiated one of his thornier sentences — limpidly constructed and perfectly easy to parse but copulating unlikely pairs of statements that you really do have to stop to process — when you finally get one of these, you smile. Now, I myself have never worked with a workout coach, much less a really good one, so I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, but it seemed to me that invoking a workout coach would make the book sound more appealing. That kind of book, then. The kind of book that treats you to a good workout. And if St Aubyn didn’t actually show me muscles that I didn’t know I had, he did teach me a few things about getting them to work.

The first thing I want to say about A Clue to the Exit is that is successful in ways that On the Edge, his immediately previous novel, is not. Off the top of my head, I can think of several reasons why this is so. The subject of inquiry in Clue is focused on one thing,  consciousness; whereas the concerns of Edge are diffused among all the varieties of spiritual enlightenment, from drugs to Tantric sex. Clue is narrated in the first person by one man; Edge is written in the third person, from several points of view. One of the points of view in On the Edge is that of Crystal Bukowski, and I am not sure that St Aubyn is up to female impersonation; for the life of me, I couldn’t shake the very unwanted image of Barbra Streisand every time Crystal opened her mouth. Crystal reappears in A Clue to the Exit, but as a figure in a drolly unentertaining little novel (about consciousness) that the narrator is trying to write during the short time left to him to live, she makes vastly reduced claims on our sympathy. St Aubyn has also learned how to avoid making the reader anxious that there is going to be a test, a test that the reader will certainly fail. Finally, A Clue to the Exit has a very simple plot that flies along like a madcap TGV (in delightful contrast to the train in the novel-within-the-novel, which breaks down at Didcot Junction). You could say that, in A Clue to the Exit, St Aubyn has learned how to write a “difficult” novel that still does all of the things that you want a novel to do. I don’t think that I’m prepared to say that, however. I think that there’s plenty of room for improvement, and I wish the author many long, productive years of filling it, and myself many long years to watch him do it.

***

Here is an example of St Aubyn’s hip, witty, and challenging prose, taken from the latter part of A Clue to the Exit.

When writers imagine a character who is dying, or condemned to die, they all to often make him ruminate about the past, worrying that he may not have led a good life, or being haunted by some forking in the road when he ran away from true love, or failed to save a friend’s life. Something with tons of flashbacks, and a big violin section. Either the character claims to have a few regrets but, then again, too few to mention after page 300, or he has the incredible courage and honesty to regret everything and wish he had not done it his way. In either case, the main feeling about dying, namely that it’s happening too soon, is blurred by a preoccupation with the past.

Well, those of us who are dying — as opposed to those who are lounging around in their studies making dinner engagements, and then reluctantly disconnecting the phone for twenty minutes in order to browse through a medical textbook and look up some realistic details — those of us who are really dying haven’t got time to ponder the past. The present is scintillating with horror and precision. The past is a luxury for people who think they have a future. Does my life have subtle connecting threads, strange coincidences, uniting themes? You’d better believe it. Things can’t help repeating themselves, can’t help colliding. That’s not meaning, it’s where the search for meaning begins.

Note the interpenetration of narrative (someone is dying) and criticism (novelists usually get dying wrong). This is by no means the most challenging passage in A Clue to the Exit; far from it. But the writing is almost always this lucid, this emphatic.

***

As I read A Clue to the Exit, I thought a lot about consciousness, a topic that once upon a time interested me enough to get me to make my way through Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. That’s a sneaky way of saying that I, too, believed that consciousness could be explained. My belief these days is that (a) I’m not equipped to study the matter, which I leave to the cognitologists in their laboratories and (b) “consciousness” is a word that, in general usage, covers many different mental phenomena. Eventually, the second statement is going to be confirmed, denied, or rendered meaningless by the scientists mentioned in the first statement, but while they’re at it I am free to attend to what I notice about my own life.

I don’t believe that there is any one way to characterize one’s mental state throughout the entire day, from getting out of bed to getting back into it. For legal convenience, we say that this time is spent consciously, but all we mean by that is that there very well may be a test, so pay attention. When we are not concerned with legal convenience, and are pretty sure that there is not going to be a test, our minds — may I beg the reader’s indulgence as I proceed in comfortable editorial plural? — move from one moment to the next in whatever manner uses the least energy. That is not a conscious decision, of course; it is the physics of survival, hardwired into the simplest organisms, and our cerebrums have not evolved beyond the elemental constraint.

Sense data piles up in heaps of triviality (if we’re lucky); we now know that parts of the brain that are not conscious attend to these inputs more or less constantly. Meanwhile, other parts of the brain talk to each other, again without intruding upon consciousness. A great deal of brainwork goes to the utterly unconscious business of regulating and registering bodily functions that it would drive us mad to be aware of, and do drive us mad when we are ill. I can’t begin to tell you how fear and desire fit into this scheme, but they bubble along in their abstracted way, coloring and otherwise interfering with our awareness of what’s going on around us. I have introduced awareness. Is it the same thing as consciousness? I don’t much care, I’m not trying to explain a system that I hardly understand. I only want to write down what seems to be happening, and what seems to be happening is that some feedback processor in my brain weighs and considers the multitude of neuronal firings according to algorithms of varying degrees of force and returns its findings to an ongoing report that, over many years, takes on the identity of “me.” (It is arguable that this identity is not complete until “I” have been ravaged by adolescence.) I’ve shamelessly borrowed the labels of mechanical computers to sketch this account, and the last thing I’d recommend is the hunt for an actual “feedback processor” or a list of the “algorithms” among the lobes of the brain. All I want to convey is the suggestion that what we call consciousness is nothing but a stream of different types of mental event.

It seems to me, further, that the richer one’s life is — the better one’s health and physical endowment, the more ample one’s resources, the denser one’s relations with other people — the mightier the stream of consciousness is going to be, the more terrifying ones’ sense of helplessly shooting unforeseeable rapids. It’s no surprise, then, to find, at the top of the tree, writers like Edward St Aubyn, fiercely studying the workings of consciousness in hopes of controlling it without turning it off. Turning it off would be dying, which, Mr Aubyn reminds us, always happens too soon.

And so we come to the end of winter, Winter 2012. Of all the cold months, February is the one that has nothing else going for it: it is simply wintry. There are no festivities to distract us from the awful weather, or from the promise of better. (This year, there were daffodils.) February does not even have the energy to last as long as the other months, although this year it was only one day shy of a normalish quota. I am always glad to see the end of February.

February 2012 will go down as the month in which I dove into the work of two completely new artists, Edward St Aubyn and Jean Dujardin. One would have been enough; two was deranging. As if to tie the experience in a pretty bow, Mr Dujardin’s Oscar win was followed yesterday by the arrival of A Clue to the Exit, the novel that Mr St Aubyn published in 2000. The little that has been written about this book will tell you that it is “about consciousness,” and maybe it is; maybe it will bog down in the second half just as On the Edge does and read like a brilliant undergraduate’s tour d’horizon of esoteric wisdom. But so far it has been increasingly funny. The narrator is the usual Aubynian fuck-up but his big problem inverts the usual Aubynian situation: he has six months to live (he’s down to five by now), and in order to write something pure and valuable (he has been a highly-rewarded hack) he must divest himself of his anaesthetizing millions. The other thing that’s funny is St Aubyn’s zest for self-parody.When he writes of a sex scene that “[w]e thrashed like marlin caught on the hooks of each other’s unforgiving genitals,” you know — if you’ve been reading as much St Aubyn as I have in one month — that the author is skewering his own verbal virtuosity. You wish that David Foster Wallace had allowed himself moments of such gleeful shamelessness.

Once I’d managed to put down A Clue to the Exit, which gripped me in its tentacles even as I extracted it from the mailing envelope, I thought that I would see what other people have to say about the book on the Internet. I typed in the author’s name and the title, all in quotation marks, and started sifting through the pile of bookseller pages. There was a Guardian review that I read, and a Telegraph review that I didn’t. Three pages in, I finally came across a link to a blog. Unfortunately, the blog was the one that you are reading. The link carried me to an entry in which I mentioned A Clue to the Exit, but of course I had not read it at the time and so had nothing to say about it: what a way to let oneself down. But another nearby link carried me to John Self’s blog, Asylum (silent lately), and his page about At Last, which came out almost a year ao in Britain. Sure enough, his entry and my entry had one thing in common, something that we share with every discussion of At Last that I’ve come across, the “surge in demand” sentence about Emily Price. I should like to know what Edward St Aubyn thinks about the massive popularity among his readers of a sentence about a character who flits through his pentalogy in the space of one or two paragraphs.

***

 

Alice Munro has a new story in this week’s New Yorker. Do you think that she means to present Canada as a land of horror? Every time I read one of her stories, I am so glad that I don’t live in Canada that I am actually glad that I do live in the United States. No other writer has this effect.

Part of it is the landscape, which in her hands appears to have been abandoned for hundreds of years — and for a good reason; you imagine that it must have been one long Wisconsin Death Trip when people lived there. There is the stale, provincial air that hangs about the small towns but about Toronto, too — always a Toronto of fifty years ago.

Then there are the men, the men who matter. They make up the rules and the women have to live with them. The women don’t much mind, because they want to live with the men. Munro’s fiction is shot through with a streak of feminine masochism that precludes revenge no matter how abruptly the oppression is eventually put to an end. In the current story, a gifted and devoted country doctor is revealed to be an impervious autocrat at home who keeps his childless wife in a cage of intimidation. “She was used to holding back until she was sure that my uncle had said all that he meant to say.”

Of course, it would have been quite different, my mother said, if they’d had children.

Imagine that. Children. Getting in Uncle Jasper’s way, whining for a corner of their mother’s attention. Being sick, sulking, messing up the house, wanting food he didn’t like.

Impossible. The house was his, the choice of menus his, the radio and television programs his. Even if he was at his practice next door, or  out on a call, things had to be ready for his approval at any moment.

The representation of children in the second paragraph, as dreary nuisances, is really rather shocking, but you don’t sense that until you look it over a second time. The first time you read the story, “Haven,” you read it through Uncle Jasper’s eyes.

I was braced for “Haven” to be one of the thrilling ghastly stories like “Wenlock Edge,” but no violence of any kind is inflicted on the narrator. The doctor behaves with an odd, almost passive rudeness when he returns from a meeting one night to discover that his wife has been entertaining not only the next-door neighbors but the his own estranged sister, a concert violinist, and the other two members of her trio. His refusal to acknowledge this woman in any way save as a source of wonder that anyone would pay to hear the sort of music that she plays — nothing personal, mind — is also shocking, but, again, only the second time. The first time, you’re just glad that Uncle Jasper doesn’t break anything. 

No doubt I lead a very protected life, but I always find talk of “good and evil” not only overwrought but simplistic. Good people — and Munro won’t permit us to deny that, on balance, Uncle Jasper is a good man — do terrible things, and, what’s worse, they feel good about it, perfectly entitled to behave badly, as Uncle Jasper clearly does at the end of “Haven,” when he imposes his own choice of organist on his sister’s funeral. There’s some question as to just who might object to this maneuver, since the sister herself is presumably beyond caring. But just because there’s no victim, that doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been an outrage.   

***

TK

The real reason why, left to myself, I wouldn’t watch the Academy Awards is that it is wearing to cry for three hours. The tears began pouring when Morgan Freeman took to the stage, at the very beginning, and intoned pious words about why we all love the movies. I didn’t particularly share his sentiments, nor did I agree with the darklighted movie stars (Edward Norton, Julia Roberts, et alia) who shared what it means to go to the movies, but I wept all the same, because the movies are sacred. They’re sacred because they’re humane, incredibly humane: they show us what it looks like to be good and to be bad (when nobody’s looking), and they make overpowering suggestions about what it feels like to be in love. We didn’t know ourselves very well before the movies; we had to make the best of philosophers’ dull plausibilities. So of course I am moved to tears when I connect with the movies. Usually, it’s five or ten minutes in a dark theatre. Three hours, and in spite of Billy Crystal, is exhausting.

Billy Crystal needs work. Surgeons ought to undo the facelifting that has so far made Billy Crystal look like the real girl that Lars outgrew in that movie. Mr Crystal ought to look more like Jack Benny, as you’d agree if you were old enough to remember Jack Benny. And speaking of Ryan Gosling, why didn’t he win something last night? He turned in three excellent performances last year, each quite unlike the other two. (In Drive, he was almost as silent as Jean Dujardin.) And where was Rachel McAdams? When will Ryan and Rachel make another movie together, this one directed by Woody Allen?

I’ll have to check this out with pen and pencil, but it seemed that, if I had seen a movie in any given category (Sound Mixing, for example), then the movie that won the award was one that I’d seen. This was largely owing to Hugo‘s sweep of production-value awards, but it still felt odd. This meant that the three Best Picture nominees that I hadn’t seen didn’t win a thing. And five of the six that I did see each won at least one award, the exception being Moneyball.  

***

Still to come: Dianne Reeves and Rose Macaulay. I just need a little while to wonder what Limitless 2 is going to be like with Jean Dujardin.

***

And Wanderlust, too. I saw it on Friday morning, largely because I was desperate to get back on schedule. I expected it to be worse than it was; the surprise was the sharpness of its jabs at American barbarism. I shouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that Mike Judge had something to do with it.

Take the horrible brother, Rick (Ken Marino). No aristocrat of the ancien régime believed himself more entitled to behave rudely, or to engage in ostentatious displays of contempt, than this pig. It’s almost too obvious and literal to be symbolic that Rick has found success in the portable toilet business. When his wife (Michaela Watkins) decides that she can’t stand him anymore, you smile an all’s-right-with-the-world smile. You’re still chuckling over her introducing her margarita maker as her best friend.

Then there are the daytime newscasters on a local Atlanta station. They, too, are pretty swinish, although they’re much better-humored than Rick. They’re also pretty dumb. Between their juvenility and the architectural nightmare of Rick’s gated community, Atlanta is rendered as a fairly unattractive town.

Then there are the hppies at the commune where most of the movie is set, persisting in behavior that was kind of exciting for twenty minutes in 1967 but which most of us, even those who weren’t aven alive — whose parents were wee bairns in 1967 — have spent the past fifty years recognizing as socially obnoxious. This is the part of the movie that triggers complaints about predictability: Wanderlust may just be the last movie in which the counterculture is satirized. It comes across as fairly excruciating here, bearable only because of the trials that it presents to George and Linda (Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston), a maxed-out, arguably mismatched couple.

You can imagine George and Linda agreeing to give marriage a try, just as they give New York a try and making documentaries a try and living in a “microloft” a try. Linda is especially big on giving things a try. But in future I would advise the actors to play siblings, not spouses. Their wiring is utterly different. Ms Aniston has always made things look easy, even enduring the heartbreak of Brad; the contrast of Mr Rudd’s eagerness to please makes her look inattentive, if not insensible. Not that I’m complaining. Their failure to connect is tragic, another one of the dark things about this movie. George and Linda are probably going to stick it out for life, bless ’em. But when they’re not laughing they will always be on different pages.

Then there’s Malin Akerman. How did her agent let her take that part? Very pretty blondes with open, guileless faces ought never, ever to let the subject of free love be entertained in their presence, much less bring it up themselves. When they do, you think: do her parents know about this movie? I’m surprised that Linda Lavin (who’s dandy as a Manhattan realtor) didn’t intervene. And while we’re on the subject of parents, poor Joe Lo Truglio’s! Our son, the nudist winemaker/novelist. I almost forgot. Wanderlust forgot, hurls a generous handful of broken glass at the publishing industry.

Alan Alda replays, with somewhat diminished vigor, his part in Flirting With Disaster. I didn’t recognize Justin Theroux, the seducer and snake who gets to pronounce the flower child’s motto, “I love you all, but I love me more.”

***

Rose Macaulay, whose astonishing Towers of Trebizond has the most surprising, quite gut-wrenching ending — imagine Barbara Pym’s coming up with a “gut-wrenching” finale, infused with the absurd disastrousness of Evelyn Waugh — will have to wait. I will say this: I can’t imagine anyone under forty enjoying the book. I’m having lunch with a friend, in a day or so, who read the book when it was new, in 1956 (I was eight at the time, and not reading much beyond the Hardy Boys). I can’t imagine what she made of it, so I wasn’t surprised to hear her say that she didn’t remember a thing about it. How, decorously, can I suggest that, just perhaps, she’s old enough for it now? 

Last night, we went to a preview of the new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (hereinafter “the Museum” — but you knew that), “The Steins Collect.” There are many points at which this show might engage my interest and attention, but they all fail. I don’t like the collection, I don’t like the Steins, and I don’t much like the show. The whole affair is a sealed tomb. I mention it not to complain, and certainly not to say bad things about the art and its collectors, but only to regret that such things happen.

There are one or two or three very nice paintings. There’s a Matisse from 1904 or so (I neglected to carry a notebook) of a wrought-silver chocolate pot that flirts, frankly beautifully, with Chardin. There’s a voluptuous still life by Hans Purrmann, Matisse’s student for a while, that I took at first to be the master’s, largely because of its handling of a textile. There’s a very sweet little view of The Bay of Nice, again by Matisse, that seems to quiver and tremble as if a chick is about to peck its way out — a chick by the name of David Hockney. There is a very curious Lady With a Fan, an early Picasso that’s apparently at the National Gallery in Washington, but neither Kathleen nor I could recall seeing it before; with the hand not holding the fan, the calmly stern woman, shown in profile, makes a Buddhist gesture of peace. This comports uneasily with her downtown manner; she really seems to be saying “Come back some other time, if you must.”

Lady With a Fan is not a particularly pretty picture, but it’s an interesting one.  There are quite a lot of pretty pictures that aren’t terribly interesting, all of them drily painted landscape sketches by Matisse. There are numerous images of Gertrude Stein, all of which made me wonder, “Who was this woman?” Overall, though, “The Steins Collect” mounts the largest array of dim and dull paintings that I have ever seen. I can’t imagine actually living with them all.

***

We’re still too close to modernism — of which Gertrude Stein was certainly a significant exponent in at least two ways, as a writer and as a critic — to judge it. There is a gash of internal hostility within the movement itself, pitting authoritarian simplifiers against playful futurologists. Seen in another light, this was a battle between totalitarians and anarchists. Neither totalitarians nor anarchists take much interest in the individual differences that sustain a rich society; on the contrary, the one thing that totalitarians and anarchists agreed about was a disapproval of individual differences, which they glibly dismissed as “narcissism.”

Gertrude Stein lived an anarchist’s life — easy to do if you’ve got plenty of money, but impossible without it unless you have a taste for explosives — yet her writing anneals the hermetic with the folksy, a combination that reminds me of Joseph Stalin. I tend to feel that Gertrude Stein ought to be interesting, but isn’t. This can be cxplained, perhaps, by the fact that Edith Sitwell got to me first.

Gertrude Stein assembled her collection in a ten-year period that came to an end on the eve of the Great War. It was during this time that Picasso underwent the full round of modernist convulsions. After the war, he emerged, in an intriguing parallel with his contemporary, Igor Stravinsky, as a neo-classicist. Modern art became a thing of the past, an achievement awaiting the world’s universal appreciation. I see Gertrude Stein, in her apartment at 27, Rue de Fleurus (near the Luxembourg Gardens), as a kind of hen, sitting on her brood of masterpieces, most of which turned out not to be. I have only one question: what would color photographs of her apartment have told us? The images of the flat that we do have suggest an unhygeinic griminess that well-brought-up Americans can’t have been comfortable with, unless of course they were making a point of it. The pictures on the walls of the Museum’s Tisch Galleries tell us that, Matisse aside, color was mistrusted by these artists and their patrons.

***

“The Steins Collect” is of course not just about Gertrude. Her brothers, Leo and Michael, collected as well — it was Michael and his wife Sarah who were partial to Matisse. I can imagine studying this show with a focus on who owned what. But first you’d have to care about something, either the Steins or these paintings, but I simply don’t care about enough of them.

In the giftshop, there were copies of  Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, bits of which I read in The New Yorker. I want to read the book entire (it’s not long) while the Steins show is up; maybe I’ll learn to see something new. I’ll always be happy to see Matisse’s Still Life with Chocolate Pot again, even if, painted in 1900, it falls outside the modernist overhaul. It’s a souvenir of a way of life that was about to crushed in every dimension, but also a beacon that guides us to the possibility of recreating civil life, as well as a herald of the bourgeois regularity that Gertrude Stein never forswore.

Well, I just can’t. I can’t drop everything and check out Andrea Riseborough, luminous, fascinating, frighteningly talented movie star though she may be. Not that there’s much to check up on — two feature films seem to be about it so far, and neither one promises to be in the least like W./E, Madonna’s sumptuous tour of the Duchess of Windsor’s gilded cage. In the past six weeks or so, I’ve dropped everything twice, once for Jean Dujardin and once for Edward St Aubyn. The excitement has exhausted me.

Here’s what I took away from W./E., Windsor-wise. Wallis Warfield was a party girl; she knew as well anybody what a snazzy drinks party ought to be like for people who didn’t have to worry about respectability — or who didn’t think they did. She had a keen sense of a certain kind of fun, and was very good at clowning around without lapsing into gaucherie.

At a certain point in time and space, Wallis found herself in the orbit of an extraordinarily chic host, whose parties everyone wanted to attend because he brought to his natural position, that of the Prince of Wales, the up-to-date glamour of a film star, David Windsor. (And he was a film star; all you have to do is look at the newsreels.) Wallis wanted very much to go to David’s parties, and she eventually “swung” it. I think that she would have been happy with that — a permanent place on the prince’s, and then the king’s, private guest list. She would have been happy for a while, anyway.

But the prince fell in love with her, and his one sovereign act was to make her his own and keep her forever. Wallis hadn’t counted with that possibility.

Whether this account accords with “what really happened” between the eventual Duke and Duchess doesn’t really interest me. “What really happened” was presumably beyond the understanding of the parties themselves in the rush of event. Madonna tells a very plausible tale about a woman who was probably, like all the others in history (especially political history), not the witch that she was made out to be. The movie is unconcerned by political conundrums, such as whether David would have made a Good King. The film is not very interested in what David himself was like — a wise choice. I expect that Madonna’s title is intended to strike us with its alternative, E./W. Ew.

It will take a while to sort out how we feel about the Abbie Cornish story line, which concerns a modern-day New Yorker called Wally. (This part of the film is set in 1998, for interesting reasons.) I’m not going to go into that now, except to say that I have always liked Ms Cornish. She is a bit strapping for someone with an obsession with Wallis Simpson, but that’s probably intentional: you can’t be too petite to play the Duchess of Windsor. If the film wisely expects us to know the outlines of the Abdication Crisis, it is not nearly so tidy about Wally’s romantic life. But Oscar Isaac and Richard Coyle are engaging costars for Abbie Cornish, and I expect that a second viewing, with the mystification out of the way, will make it easier to judge Madonna’s achievement.

For the moment, I counsel anyone who can’t make up his or her mind about W./E. to fix on one great moment, a performance that merits showering Andrea Riseborough with every known award, including the Garter. In an episode labeled “1972,” Wallis asks the dying David if he would like her to read to him. He pulls down his oxygen mask and asks her to dance. So she does: she does the Twist. She does the Twist the way fiercely fun-seeking glamour girls of the middle of the last century did the Twist, with the economy and verve of Margot Fonteyn. The scene could not be more Vogue-ready if Diana Vreeland had conceived, shot, and danced it herself.

And yet it is also an utterly timeless dance, as hieratically erotic as anything that Cleopatra did for Caesar. Commanding a woman to dance for you has been one of the hallmarks of the powerful male since powerful males were introduced. Beneath the black-helmeted carapace of her unflagging toilette, Andrea Riseborough’s Wallis packs millennia of female professionalism and distaste. She even manages to enjoy herself: she knows exactly how to decorate her twisting paisley top with glittering sequins of ridicule. She is like a Tosca who doesn’t need to kill the man before whom the world, would you believe it, trembled. I’ll be damned if this doesn’t go down as one of the most notable clips in cinema history.

***

As we sat at our table at Veselka yesterday, I couldn’t stop asking myself why we didn’t do this more often, Will and I. He took his seat without a booster and behaved very, very well, considering that he is only two! I must insist that he behaved very well by anybody’s standards. True, he treated the flatware as percussion instruments for a while, but he wasn’t very noisy and he seemed to be well aware that knives and forks can hurt you if you don’t know what you’re doing. True, he refused all but the tiniest morsels of the grilled cheese sandwich, preferring to eat my frites. He was on his feet for a short time, while we waited for another order of French fries, but he didn’t bother other customers or get in the waitstaff’s way. More objective witnesses might have made a different evaluation of his behavior, but I thought that Will was an angel, and I wondered why we didn’t do this more often.

First, Will is usually at day care, or, as I call it, “in school.” School is closed this week for some reason, and alternative arrangements needed tweaking at the last minute; I was only too happy to step in, especially after Tuesday’s terrors. The second reason why we don’t “do this more often” is that Will has only recently returned from a spell of refusing to sit at table. Intoxicated by ever-widening capacities for running, jumping, scrambling, climbing, and discovering what he can and cannot squeeze himself in to, Will was not disposed, for several months, to sit still when eating. Eating itself did not interest him much. Kathleen and I would gaze wistfully at the “Mr Dinner Party” picture of him at eight months, when he would happily spend an hour in his little seat, clipped on to the table, and eat just about everything (especially buttered rolls). We would shake our heads at the passing of time: Will had certainly outgrown his Mr Dinner Party days. It would take our breath away: how could the autumn of 2010 seem so distant?  

What happened yesterday is still too painful to talk about — and, besides, it didn’t happen yesterday, I just found out about it. It seemed, for several hours, to be so grossly awful that I took a Xanax to calm down, and I never take Xanax unless I’m on a plane. When I confess that it all had to do with iTunes, you’ll stifle a laugh; how could I be so upset about that?

I’ll answer obliquely. The other day, I had lunch with an English friend whom I often pester for pronunciations. Having surprised her with “tassles” for “Lascelles,” I bore her gentlest of rebukes for “Hairwood” instead of “Harwood.” She asked why I cared; “Americans never do.” I muttered something about wanting not to seem a fool, but completely forgot until later the taproot of the urge, which was planted during my radio days. In my day, if you wanted to get a job at your college classical radio station (and there were many such), you were given a long list of foreign names to read aloud. It was a sifting of shibboleths. If you said Bate Hoven and Moats Art instead of what unlettered people say, you had a chance at the job. Curiously, there were no British names on the list. One of the earls of Harewood might have written a book about opera, but he didn’t write any music (or, if he did…). And everyone can say “Elgar.”

Now some figures: since June 2011. I have added 20 gigs of new music to my iTunes library, but I have modified — updated and improved the “info” — on 70 gigs’ worth of files. When all that and more seemed lost yesterday, I needed a pill.

***

Today, I’m heading downtown for a bit of impromptu babysitting. It’s a good day for it; clear and not too cold. Will and I will go to the park. He has recently become a little less wild, less drunk on his new powers of locomotion. Well, they’re not new anymore; he’s been running around for nearly half his life by now. One of his favorite words is “Come,” usually spoken with an outstretched palm.

What I’d have done with the day to myself… well, providentially, I really was going to go to the movies. I was going to see W./E.; I’m dying to watch Laurence Fox stutter, and to see if Andrea Riseborough is as good as Anthony Lane says she is.

***

Last night, in any case, was brightened by a new book, The Towers of Trebizond, by Rose Macaulay. I  gave Rose Macaulay a try a million years ago and it didn’t take, but a blogger whom I follow, Levi Stahl of I’ve Been Reading Lately (I believe that he’s attached to the University of Chicago Press) wrote up the recent NYRB edition so enthusiastically (and well) that I had to give it a try. I’m liking it enormously, not least because there’s a priggish prelate by the name of Chantry-Pigg. More, though, for the dry perfection of the tone:

But aunt Dot could only think how Priam and Hecuba would have been vexed to see the state it had all got into and no one seeming to care any more. She thought the nations ought to go on working at it and dig it all up again, and perhaps do some reconstruction, for she belonged to the reconstruction school, and would have liked to see Troy’s walls and towers rising once more against the sky like a Hollywood Troy, and the wooden horse standing beside them, opening mechanically every little while to show that it was full of armed Greeks.

But I thought there were enough cities standing about the world already, and that those which had disappeared had better be left alone, lying under the grass and asphodel and brambles, with the wind sighing over them and in the distance the sea where the Greek ships had lain waiting ten years for Trojam incensam, and behind them Mount Ida, from which the unfair and partial gods had watched the whole affair.

Pretty super stuff.

Oy! I get to the computer bright and early this morning, and what do I see? A blue screen! Well, perhaps not the fabled nightmare blue screen, the message from the beyond that used to mean:”Fun’s over — you’ll be out of commission for a week at least.” No, it was just the “HP Invent” screen that comes on when I reboot. The machine was stuck there. I had no idea why. Why I had no idea why is the actual mystery.

After a bit of poking and restarting and whatnot, I finally gave up and went to work on the laptop. Which was a drag, but I could manage; I’d just have to download all recent images from my camera, so that I could use the image above (a shopwindow on 57th Street). Drat — I didn’t have an extra cable. When I came back in to fetch the cable from the stalled computer, it was entangled with the iPod cable. Before unraveling them, I detached the new Nano that I was setting up late last night.

You know what’s going to happen next; you know how these fairy tales work. You saw the fatal words, the new Nano that I was setting up late last night. What a world of mischief there is in attempts to set things up late at night!

I detached the new Nano, and the computer sprang to life. Here’s what appears to have happened: in the middle of the night, Microsoft updated the Internet Explorer browser. When the computer was instructed to reboot, it got stuck when it couldn’t decide what the iPod was doing there.

***

It reminded me of the days when something like that happened at least once a week. Even without my help. But, d’you know what? I don’t want to think about the old days. The old days were terrible. The present day isn’t all that great, really, but it’s things are a hell of a lot more dependable.

That said, I long to be free of WordPress. Which is probably why I don’t want to remember the bad old days. Things are tough enough as it is.  

***

Without the computer snafu, I don’t know what I’d have written about first thing this morning. Every spare moment yesterday went to reading The Vault.  This involved long stretches of poring over the A-Z(ed) and reacquainting myself with the roadways of St John’s Wood, a part of London that I’ve never been to.

I have to re-read A Sight for Sore Eyes now. There was no need to search the Internet to establish a connection between the two books; the dust jacket of The Vault plainly announces it — on the back, the part that I never read. Here’s how firmly I ignore the puffery on the backs of novels: I was astonished, one time, to learn that the friend with whom I was discussing a book had himself written a blurb for it, which indeed appeared on the dust jacket. That was a bit embarrassing.

What drove me crazy about not having A Sight for Sore Eyes to hand yesterday was trying to remember how Teddy Brex, the hero/villain of the piece, wound up in the coal pit at the end. That’s of course what stuck in my mind about the book: the horrible end of Teddy Brex. Happily, Ruth Rendell dropped enough hints throughout The Vault to jog my recollection, and the answer came to me just a few pages before Wexford slipped on the wet leaves of Virginia creeper in the yard of Orcadia Cottage and figured it out.

***

The new Nano is tiny, barely larger than a postage stamp, less than half the size of the one that it’s to replace. It’s probably the last Nano that I shall ever buy. My next purchase will be another classic iPod. I will put all of my playlists on that one, or as many as will fit.

I now have two distinct music systems. Each room has its own stereo setup, with DVD/CD player, amplifier, and reasonably good speakers. Each of these has an iPod dock as well, so that an iTunes playlist can be played in one room with really good sound. The other system is a network of three Klipsch players, no longer manufactured, that connect wirelessly. The connection is not very reliable, and on Sundays it tends to break up with annoying frequency; there must be some sort of interference from cellphones or other devices. But this is the system, for all it’s faults, that’s usually playing, because it provides the background music that lubricates my movements from room to room.

I could, of course, stick a Nano in my pocket and wear headsets; that’s what young people do. I wonder if they’ll still rely on headsets when they get to be my age. There comes a point when you’re no longer comfortable in that bubble of sound, any more than you would be if, wherever you looked, all you could see was a movie projected onto your eyeglasses. There is also the faint absurdity of private music in a private home with only one person in residence. The playlists that I feed through the Klipsch system have also been designed not to bother Kathleen — no booming requiems or arresting rhythmic irregularities. The background music is an important part of the apartment’s look and feel. 

Someday, in better times, it will a lot easier than it is now to compile playlists of classical music. iTunes isn’t designed for it, not at all. If there is an app for classical-music library management, I’ve never heard of of it. Who would use it, besides me an perhaps a thousand other people on earth? But that’s what better times will bring: powerful apps that are easily created and tailored to one user’s needs.

As distinct from the “better times” in which everyone learns to be happy with the same handful of resources. The better times of Idiocracy.

The hibernating has me a bit worried. I can’t get up in the morning, and all I want to do is read. I don’t play music much. If I’m lucky enough, I congratulate myself upon the felicity of not having to go outside. I can’t say that I’m particularly tired, or otherwise afflicted. Kathleen, who is not, for the moment, concerned — if I’m still loitering in bed two weeks from now, then we’ll call the doctor — takes a retrospective view: I’m recuperating. Recuperating from what? Recuperating from convalescing from a holiday of colds and mourning? What I feel rather is that I’m storing up energy for something momentous. This is not a good feeling. I hope that Kathleen is right.

All about the apartment, there are signs of a stall: an unpacked shopping bag, a stack of DVDs that ought to be put away somewhere, an old picture frame that I have to ask Kathleen about (repair or toss?). In the bathroom this morning, I was confronted by a roll of toilet paper on the counter by the sink, and an empty box of Kleenex. In the kitchen, the ice bin was empty. These little jobs ordinarily have to wait until I’ve done my morning writing, but I didn’t trust myself to get to them later. I took care of them before I sat down. But I stopped short of replacing the shower-curtain liner, even though the replacement liner has been lying on the bathroom counter for nearly three months.

Yesterday, I came home from lunch with a friend, changed into dry clothes, and sat in the bedroom and read. I read for hours. I read an entire novel, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Spell. It put me under a spell, but I was a willing subject. The hero, Alex Nichols, is a very nice man. Although beautiful, he is buttoned-down and very shy. He likes his job overseeing pension funds at the Foreign Office. He is 36 or 37, and heartbroken by the defection of his boyfriend, who after a two-year relationship up and moved out, claimed, we soon learn, by another man. Alex is deeply demoralized at the beginning, but Hollinghurst makes sure that your pity never idles into contempt. At an awkward weekend house party, Alex meets somebody new, and falls under his spell. You know it can’t work, but, again, Hollinghurst steers you away from clucking disapprovingly and deriding Alex for not sharing your misgivings. You have to find out how Alex will bear up under the inevitable second helpings of wretchedness.

Here’s how:

This second failure was a shocking reinforcement of the first. And yet he had to admit that there was something ambiguously easier about it too: he already knew the lesson, he knew the bereft amazement of finding that you had unwittingly had your last fuck, your last passionate kiss, your last taxi-ride hand-in-hand in the gloom; and he knew too that on both occasions there had been signals, like the seen but noiseless drum-strokes of a tympanist checking his tuning.

In short, he bears up nicely.

***

 Here it is, Friday morning, and I ought to be at the movies, but that’s not happening. I was going to see W/E, Madonna’s movie about the Windsors. (In the trailer, Laurence Fox stutters at least as well as Colin Firth did in the same role.) I want to see if Andrea Riseborough is as superb as Anthony Lane says she is. And Judy Parfitt as Queen Mary — how terrifying is that! (In the trailer, her way with “a married woman!” all but curdles the film stock.) Also, there’s Abbie Cornish, who appeals to me for no special reason.

The Abdication Crisis fascinated me when I was a teenager, possibly because I was too young to understand it, but more likely because I was genuinely confused by the opposing pulls of duty and glamour. Without the glamour, there would be no story at all, nothing even as noteworthy as Prince Leopold’s dying of hemophilia and not marrying Alice Liddell. Running off to marry Wallis Simpson was clearly wrong, but what fantastic style! And then the abdication turned out to be best for England as well — probably. Had Edward VIII been a man of honor, his niece would still have succeeded him, but there might not have been a throne for her to sit on.

The one and only time that I consulted a microfilm as an undergraduate, it was to see what The New Yorker had to say about “the woman I love.” Nothing, actually — Janet Flanner’s piece (Jan 19, 1936) doesn’t mention Mrs Simpson. Here is the final paragraph, which seems to stand for the proposition that There Will Always Be An English Muddle:

Politically, the English are dualists in a manner fomerly confined to metaphysics. With their rational mind, they empower democracy, but with their emotional imagination, they still give credit, perhaps wisely, to that miracle-loving element in human beings which tends toward iconography, kings, prophets, and special beings in strange, lovely garments. This element in other lands has recently found its less monarchic outlet in Nazi trappings, Fascist fanfares, a Communism which makes a shrine of Lenin’s tomb, and, in America, a worship of cinema stars. King Edward has left the hierarchic for the romantic. He has been temporarily distrusted; it is possible that hereafter he will always be loved.

“Loved” is not quite the word for the spell that the Windsors cast.  

Last Friday, we saw Woody Allen again, Ms NOLA and I. We had just turned the corner from 82nd Street onto Madison Avenue, and were heading south, to Crawford Doyle. With the gentlest insistence, Ms NOLA urged me to look up. (She knows that, because of ankylosing spondylitis, my eyes are usually directed at the pavement when I’m walking.) I did as bid, and there they were, Mr & Mrs, walking in our direction. As soon as I had taken them in, I dropped my gaze. It felt like an invasion of privacy to have paid any attention at all. But this time, at least, I did see him.

***

We had been coming from the Museum the first time, too. I think that we had just seen the Diane Arbus exhibit. It was snowing, heavily and quietly. I wanted a cup of tea, or perhaps I’d just bought some books at the gift shop, but in any case we kept straight on 82nd Street. It was on the Park Avenue median that Ms NOLA asked me if I’d seen him. Whom? Woody Allen. No, I hadn’t. I’d been too busy airing my latest theories about the bourgeoisie.

I remember what I was talking about because I hoped, when Ms NOLA told me whom we’d just passed, that Woody Allen hadn’t been too lost in thought to hear me carrying on as if I were re-enacting a familiar scene from one of his movies. In the middle of the day, an older man, who probably ought to be at work, discourses sagely to a pretty young woman, in whom he takes an avuncular but not ungallant interest. We might have been John Houseman and Martha Plimpton, in Another Woman. What enameled the incident with perfection was my having been too busy dispensing my wisdom to notice the passing writer and director.

Never had I felt so compleatly the New Yorker. If Woody Allen didn’t catch me in the act, it wasn’t my fault.

Circuses have never appealed to me. Animals don’t really interest me, and I don’t care for their smell. But it’s the human component that puts me off. In the circus, the illusion that the performing artist is having a good time — common to all the arts, even the ones that don’t involve performance; this is why everyone wants to meet artists (a mistake in most cases) — is exaggerated to the point of a smirking dare. Can you possibly be so stupid as to imagine that pleasure has anything at all to do with the clown’s leering grin?

All of this is precisely what made the circus appealing to modernists like Stravinsky, and to his sophisticated audiences, who considered themselves superior to bourgeois, fun-seeking naïveté. The pathos of circus life underlies the brittleness of Petrouchka, of course, but it was after World War I that Stravinsky made the pathos itself brittle, and never moreso than in L’Histoire de soldat, a circus-within-a-circus work that I wish I could have stayed for at last night’s ACJW recital at Weill Recital Hall. The important thing is that I got to hear the companion piece, commissioned by ACJW and Carnegie Hall, that was played before the intermission, a 25-minute work in three movements with pre-, inter-, and postludes, written by four composers as a consortium called Sleeping Giant. Had I been able to stay for the longer second part of the program — had I not had a date for Valentine’s Day dinner with my wife — I expect that I’d have found the Stravinsky interesting but slightly stale, at least after Histories, as the companion piece is called, proved to be both so interesting and so novel.

At dinner, after I’d described it, Kathleen asked me if I thought that Histories would work as a recording. I’d love to find out, but I’d have to sit through a second performance to be sure. Histories is the first piece of purely instrumental music that I’ve ever heard of, aside of course from Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, that asks the musicians to do something besides play. At one point, the four wind players left the stage for stations in the side aisles, from which they blew through their instruments so as to suggest winds or waves, although of course no suggestion at all may have been intended. It would be easy to make the staging of Histories sound silly, but in fact it was fun. That’s what makes Histories essentially unlike the work from which it draws its inspiration. Today’s younger classical-music composers are after serious fun. Nothing could be more rigorously strained out of their music than the cynicism that is always curdling the edges of Stravinsky’s work.

***

The four composers who constitute Sleeping Giant are Andrew Norman, Jacob Cooper, Robert Hornstein, and Christopher Cerrone (it seems that there are six giants in all, two of whom did not participate in this project), and their collaboration is rich enough but also sufficiently unified to suggest a new School of New York — a School of Brooklyn, more like. Born between 1979 and 1984, these musicians have evidently made a commitment to the traditional materials of classical music — the instruments, the system of notation, and of course the long list of compositions. But they are also young men of today, presumably unfamiliar with the deviceless life and as keen to have something happen right now as any gamer — or not! Although I can easily imagine a response to Histories that would dismiss it as racket and noise when it wasn’t repetitious, I’m very aware that such dismissals invariably attend early departures in new directions; you can go all the way back to Hugo’s Hernani for fine examples of fustian disapproval.  I am certainly not equipped to describe Histories in terms that would argue its musical accomplishments, but I can try to tell you why I liked it.

Histories adopts the orchestration of Stravinsky’s suite from L’Histoire du soldat: violin (Keats Dieffenbach), bass (Brian Ellingsen), clarinet (Paul Won Jin Cho), bassoon (Shelley Monroe Huang), trumpet (Nathan Botts), trombone (Richard Harris), and percussion (David Skidmore). And it borrows a few themes, or fragments of themes. But it is most like Stravinsky in that it doesn’t sound like Stravinsky at all; rather, it renews what you might call his exploration of the atomic structure of music. What is music, really, and what exactly does a trombone do? In order to engage an audience with these questions, you have to call attention to what’s going on on stage, and avoid sending the listeners off into reveries. Sleeping Giant has two principal strategies for making things fresh, and both depend on unblended textures in which, playing together, instruments nevertheless resist producing a “joint” sound. One strategy is to ripple the textures with complicated but comprehensible rhythms; another is to luxuriate reiteravely. The contributions of Mr Cooper (“Agitated, stumbling, like an endless run-on sentence”) and Mr Cerrone (“Marionettes”) exploit the first approach; Mr Hornstein’s “Recovering” embodies the second, taking a phrase from Stravinsky’s “Pastorale” and marbling it on the vibraphone.

Andrew Norman provides the prelude, the interludes, and the postludes, brief bits of amusing warm-up music that I should have appreciated better if I were more familiar with L’Histoire du soldat — my bad. His pieces established Mr Skidmore, the percussionist, as the MC/ringmaster of Histories. The proceedings were cued throughout by the scratching of a gourdlike instrument in the form of an oversized baguette. At Mr Skidmore’s signal, the other instrumentalists turned this way or that, or froze in place; it might have been dreadfully fatuous if it hadn’t been so light-handed.

The titles of the individual pieces proved to be singularly apt. Mr Skidmore’s virtuosos drumming propelled the “run-on sentence” of Mr Cooper’s composition. Did it go on for too long? I didn’t think so, but I probably would have been less patient thirty years ago. Although there wasn’t much in the way of a tune (I understate) and the drumming was insistent, I was never annoyed or eager for the piece to stop. It stopped just about where it ought to. Mr Cerrone’s “Marionettes” was exactly that, if you can imagine not little people on strings but ferocious tropical, perhaps prehistorical birds, all of them pecking at indigestible diamonds. I didn’t think of birds while the music lasted; it was only when it was over, and I asked myself, “What was that?” that the image popped into view. If you really pay attention to “Marionettes,” you probably won’t have the mental room for daydreaming about birds.

***

 This would be a good point to write about the enormous shift in sophistication that Histories registers — the shift, that is, from Stravinsky’s hyper-sophisticated faux-folk music. Sleeping Giant, for example, stands in utterly different relation to the popular; in our time, it is the popular that is overworked to the point of corruption, and classical music that is, somewhat astonishingly, artless. I shall leave it at that. I was grateful to hear Histories in the Weill, because gold-and-white neoclassical rooms are part of the classical-music tradition, too, and I am more at home in them than I would be (I expect; I haven’t been) at a downtown venue such as Le Poisson Rouge. The venue underscored the degree to which Sleeping Giant is up to something really new.

Two stories in today’s Times seem to me to ring the same bell. Joe Nocera lights into the NCAA yet again, this time in a somewhat backward fashion, by “praising” the organization for turning a blind eye on entrenched practices in amateur/collegiate hockey that it would prohibit in any other sport. Nocera believes that these practices are beneficial to young athletes and ought to be the rule, not the exception. Why aren’t they? Because they interfere with revenue streams that accrue to colleges at the athletes’ expense, that’s why. It’s pretty sickening stuff.

The other story needs even less in the way of summary. Truly independent fair-labor watchdogs are laughing at Apple’s pious decision to sponsor the investigation of the Foxconn City plants, where many of its products are made, by the Fair Labor Association — an outfit that, like the NCAA, is funded by the very enterprises that it is supposed to regulate.

(Technical point: the FLA will be investigating Apple’s supplier, not Apple itself. Ultimately, however, it is Apple’s decision to continue working with the Foxconn City folks that is on the line.)

Into those stories, stir the debate about the Volcker Rule. Bankers are complaining that the Rule will cost them inordinate amounts of money and also lead to job loss. Volcker to banks: tough noogies.

What all three of these stories have in common, I think, is that the behavior to be prevented or regulated is wicked. Not criminal, necessarily, but certainly nasty. Take sweatshop conditions, where the factory might be clean and well-ventilated but the workers are subject to a midnight wake-up call to meet the whims of some dork at Apple (happily no longer likely to be “the best businessman in the world today,” Dork-in-Chief Steve Jobs). How do you rationalize treating workers badly? Here’s how you do it in the early Twentieth Century: you exploit Chinese workers. You exploit Confucian ethics and Asian authoritarianism: They’re like that anyway. And maybe they are, but of course that’s not the point, not if you’re an American wondering what it cost to put an iPad in your hands for only $500.

The case of the NCAA is darkly fascinating. The point of the Association is to protect athletes from commercial exploitation. All well and good, but the mission was corrupted when the schools belonging to the Big Ten and the other football circuits were in a position to do the commercial exploitation. Once again, the underlying behavior, the exploitation of adolescent athletes, is obviously wicked. No matter who does it, it’s wrong! And Joe Nocera is certainly making the case that schools are exploiting their so-called student athletes. Even if the player gets a degree, what has he actually learned in school? How well are thesse “students” prepared for the lives that they will, with any luck, live to live after their bodies cease to be profit centers?   

***

As for the bankers, can anyone tell me where, on this particular moment on the Blue Planet, big banking is being done in a responsible, constructive way that does more than pour the odd bonus into punters’ pockets? South America, perhaps. You don’t hear terrible things these days about South American banking. Maybe it’s in no shape to keep up with the smart alecks in Japan, China, Europe, and the United States who have developed a broad portfolio of fucked-up strategies.

(And while we’re on the subject of smart alecks, may I suggest to Andrew Ross Sorkin that addressing Paul Volcker, even in hypothetical punditry, with a sentence beginning “C’mon…” is unbecoming? ) 

My question is this: how do you “regulate” wickedness? Is it possible?